XIX ISA World Congress of Sociology (July 15-21, 2018)

575

Decolonizing (trans)Gender: Gender Diversity and (in)Visibility from a Transnational Perspective

RC32 Women in Society (host committee)

Language: English

Gender and citizenship have become deeply intertwined as a consequence of social and political struggles aiming at redefining the rights of women and LGBTQ+ individuals. These movements, a central feature of the social and political dynamics initiated in the 20th century, peaked when notions of a gendered self conformed to binary categories of femininity/masculinity started to be challenged.  Division between the West and the rest regained relevance, with the rise of contrasting imaginaries of gendered selfhood, either targeting femininity, masculinity or gender-variant individuals. The confrontation between the global north and the south permeates notions and possibilities for gender diversity itself. While the pre-colonial still feeds western imagenaries, the west continues to play a key role in current struggles in favour of gender equality and/or diversity. Notably, transgender communities outside the west begun to be either viewed as havens of traditional acceptance – normally corrupted by western colonial powers and the gender schemes of modernity – or depicted as places of infringement of basic human rights. Are these present-day movements offering redemption or re-colonization? Are these same movements feeding unreal narratives of past and present that reinstate the opposition between tradition and modernity and fall into the exoticization of a gendered other? This session invites  papers that reflect on how transnational movements for gender equality and/or diversity might operate through the mobilization of paradoxical categories, which do not always provide the basis for the decolonization of gender and the visibility of categories and lives in non-western geographies.